By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 4/28/24

My mention in my last essay of using the Estonian route to St Petersburg now that the Finnish border crossings are temporarily or, more likely, permanently closed, elicited several expressions of interest from readers, some of whom also may be looking for new ways to access Russia from Europe.

In past travel notes, I devoted some attention to the peculiarities of the political situation in Estonia where the Prime Minister and her government are among the most vicious Russophobes on the Continent and biggest cheerleaders for NATO expansion, to the outskirts of Moscow if they had their way. At the same time, their capital, Tallinn, has a substantial Russian-speaking population. I have in mind permanent residents, not tourists passing through. You see and hear them not only in the pedestrian zones of historic Tallinn but also in the shopping malls at the city outskirts. When we took the Tallink ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn a week ago many if not most of the passengers, particularly the younger ones, were Russian speakers who seemed very much at home.

Considering the anti-Russian policies and propaganda of the government, you may wonder why Russians come and why Russian speakers stay in Estonia.

Allow me to venture a guess based on what I saw as a bus traveler going from Tallinn to St Petersburg when I looked up from the movie screen in front of my seat and looked out the window. There is no denying that the farmsteads and little settlements on the Estonian territory along this west-east route are in better condition and more prosperous than the little wooden houses, some dilapidated, that line the road on first 100 km inside the Russian territory. As you move further east in Russia, the houses show prosperity, but they are already the country residences of Petersburgers, not the indigenous population. And, of course, when you approach Petersburg itself, the dynamism of the city is evident in world class infrastructure including some remarkable bridges and arterial highways.

My point is that Russian speakers in Estonia may well appreciate that they are living in a country with higher living standards for the lower strata of society than in neighboring Russia.

In this essay, I intend to add some realism as regards foreigners’ dealings with the authorities, beginning with the first obligation of anyone arriving here for more than eight business days: registration with the communal offices.

This is something that Western experts who have official Russian hosts have not faced, since the hosts take care of it all, very discreetly. The same is true for tourists on short visits: the registration is performed by the front desk staff of the hotels they stay in. But for all others, and that includes myself traveling on a visit to relatives, one is obliged to visit the nearest government office performing registration of foreigners and fill out 4-page registration forms that are very demanding. Filling out the papers by hand can be maddening, because any error you make sends you back to point zero, told to start afresh. And filling the form out on your computer using a downloaded form comes up against the Russian bureaucrats’ making little changes here or there in the form at least once a year without warning, which may well invalidate the now outdated form you are using.

In this essay I may disappoint readers who would like to believe that Moscow is the New Rome and that Russia is a very desirable place to live compared to the West which seems to have entered into moral degeneracy and terminal decline.

This turn of mind is now rather fashionable ever since Tucker Carlson in several video reports following his interview with Vladimir Putin, took his audience on a walking tour of Russian supermarkets and debunked all notions that Russians are suffering from the effects of Western sanctions. What he showed was a cornucopia, he demonstrated that Russians are ‘spoiled for choice’ in their diet, as the Brits would say.

Meanwhile, Carlson’s filmed visit to the Moscow subway showed that Russian public services are world leaders and not decrepit, as the liars among our government leaders and captive press in the West would have us believe.

However, Carlson had neither the time, nor the background knowledge to pick up nuances that go beyond the presence of Snickers in food stores or the quality and price of fruit and vegetables on sale in Moscow. I intend to present a more balanced view of how Russia and Russians are faring now in this third year of the Ukraine war.

As it turns out, precisely the food supply and pricing is the most positive feature of everyday life. It has not only held steady but is visibly improving in ways that both average workaday Russians and the wives of better-paid corporate managers can see and feel. The government claims that, overall, 2023 was a year that saw real wages rise 5% across the country. Judging by what the supermarkets are stocking, there is every reason to believe that consumer spending is ticking up, not just on essentials but on extravagances that brighten daily lives.

As recently as a year ago, when I sought to prepare a festive meal to treat visiting friends, I had to travel to the Petersburg central district from my outlying borough of Pushkin, 15 km away. Today, there is absolutely no need to go further than several hundred meters from my apartment building on foot to pick up delicacies that exceed even the high expectations of your typical Russian guest.

New specialty stores have opened in my neighborhood, which is populated not only by corporate managers but also by folks of modest means, including a large contingent of military families. Pushkin is home to a number to Ministry of Defense institutes, always has been going back to tsarist times. It also is a training center for military personnel sent here by ‘friendly countries.’ And so I am not surprised to see several blacks in their home country uniforms doing shopping in my Economy supermarket.

Regarding the new retailers, I think in particular of “Caviar and Fish,” whose product offering I will mention in a minute. Then there is the local branch of a Belarus food products chain that offers very good hard cheeses and dairy products. And further afield, 2 km away in the ‘downtown’ of Pushkin, a branch of the Bouchet bakeries has opened, offering for sale very authentic jumbo croissants, fruit pies and cream-filled cakes of every variety.

Changes even have come to the long-existing Economy class supermarket across the road from my apartment, Verny, which now offers some high value yet affordably priced items that Russian consumers adore. The most exceptional of these is premium, tender smoked white fish from Lake Ladoga, vacuum packed in 200g portions. This maslyanaya ryba (literally ‘butter fish’) is a favorite of Petersburgers. For years, our friends traveled across the border to Finland to buy this and similar smoked fish delicacies. Let the Finns weep over their lost trade while they build their border wall now.

The ‘ Caviar and Fish’ shop opened at some time in the past 7 months when I was unable to visit Petersburg. It is also part of a retail chain in Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast. The product range is limited and focused on what you simply cannot find elsewhere, not here and certainly not in Belgium: fresh, unpasteurized red salmon (gorbusha or keta) caviar in plastic containers of 125 grams flown in from Kamchatka in the Russian Far East and priced from 7.50 to 9.50 per pack. Then there is an assortment of black caviar offerings from various members of the sturgeon family, ranging from the enormous Beluga native to the Caspian down to the trout-sized sterlet that used to abound in West European and British rivers once upon a time and was the fish of royalty. The black caviar comes in glass containers of as little as 50 grams and is of two very different types: fish-farmed or wild. The wild version is 40% more expensive than the farmed fish caviar, but the difference between the two is day and night.

 Except for plutocrats in the West, few of us venture to explore the difference. In Russia, even folks who watch their budgets will do the taste test to celebrate some memorable anniversary with the right kind of caviar.

In Belgium, in Israel, in France, in Italy, in Russia and surely in many other countries, during the winter holiday season shops and restaurants feature the locally raised sturgeon caviar for a touch of extravagance. Given the tiny amount in sampler glass containers, you do not feel the hefty price per kg and may splurge on what is, from my experience, close to tasteless. By contrast, real wild Beluga is sensual and rich in taste.

This new wild sturgeon caviar in “Caviar and Fish” will cost you between 35 and 50 euros for 50 grams, but you and the person you choose to treat will have no regrets. This takes you back in time to the heyday of Soviet Russia, when many things in public life may have been fairly awful but when the luxury dining pleasures available to select offspring of the proletariat and their foreign guests were extraordinary.

Of course, there are also down to earth gastronomic pleasures that everyone here can and does indulge, none more so than the seasonal little fish called koryushka that is caught on its way from Lake Ladoga to the Gulf of Finland to spawn in the period following the break-up of ice on the lake and river. Now is the time, and a plate full of freshly fried koryushka is a must for visitors to the city in the coming several weeks. At the market, these fish sell for about 7 euros per kg in the best size category.

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Setting a lavish table for guests is a tradition deeply embedded in the culture here. But the other side of the coin is lavish gifts from guests to host.

In anticipation of reader comments that I am describing the way of life of the wealthy, I point out that our guests are from the intelligentsia stratum of society that never was nor is today well paid or well pensioned. One of our guests is a semi-retired journalist, editor of a publication of the Union of Journalists and part-time professor in a Moscow School of Continuing Education. Another guest is a retired engineer-designer of modules for civilian-purposed rockets, whose pension is above average only because he is a blokadnik, meaning a survivor of the Great Siege of Leningrad in WWII.

The lavish gifts to one’s host may take the form of the bottle of 15 year old fine Georgian brandy (konyak) that our Moscow friend brought us a couple of days ago. But it always takes the form of a bouquet of flowers for the lady of the house. And to ensure that no visitor comes empty handed even in our outlying borough, in our residential neighborhood there is a 24-hour florist just a 5 minute walk away from our house. Indeed, our guests brought roses to our home banquet.

Sanctions or no sanctions, the Dutch flower trade continues to function in Russia very well. Amsterdam is the source for most everything you see in shops. Since the price for flowers was always very high here, the additional costs of getting payments to the supplier while circumventing the SWIFT blockade are passed along to consumers without problems. I was delighted to pick up some very fresh tulips the other day, paying 10 euros for 8 flowers, which is a premium of just 20% above what I pay for the same in Brussels.

Prices above Western levels almost never apply to foodstuffs, which, as Tucker Carlson correctly pointed out, are generally several times (not percent, but times) below supermarket prices in Western Europe on an apples for apples basis.

However, let us not pretend that there are no negative sides to the sanctions for the Russian consumer. This comes into view when you redirect your attention to computers, smart phones, home electronics, white goods and similar. Suffice it to say here that most well known global (Western) brands have been sold off since the Special Military Operation began and have not been replaced. What you see instead, on the computer Notebook or Laptop shelves are what we would call ‘no-names’ or Brand X coming from China’s producers for their domestic market. And if you find an Asus or Acer, then, as I heard from the salesman in our local branch of a nationwide electronics chain, they cannot sell you Microsoft Office software. Why not? Probably this is due to orders from the manufacturer. This does not mean that you will not have Office on your computer, but you will be buying a pirated version and Microsoft may cause you many headaches when they detect it, as they surely will. I know from personal experience.

I say this as a ‘down payment’ on my next installment of travel notes.

                                                                              *****

Before closing, I wish to share with you our experience of what makes Russia, and in particular St Petersburg, the unique cultural center in the world that it is, and the decisive reason why I keep coming back year after year.

As I said above, many of our long time friends in the city are card carrying members of the Russian intelligentsia. That makes them interesting personalities by definition. Politically it makes them nearly all “Westernizers” or “Liberals” by definition. But in this essay, I put politics aside.

Our Tamara arranged for the six of us to visit a “concert” given by a well known performer and teacher of traditional Russian romances in a most extraordinary venue: the musical scores and instruments shop called Severnaya Lira (Northern Lyre) on Nevsky 26, just adjacent to the landmark pre-Revolutionary Singer Building dating from the start of the 20th century that has for decades served as Petersburg’s number one bookseller.

The Northern Lyre has been operating at this address from before I moved to Petersburg in 1994 to work and live. This is the store where we bought a slightly tired but still functional Krasny Oktyabr upright piano that we still keep in our apartment. It is where I bought all my scores for learning to play the cello straight through to the German edition of Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello.

The store used to be shabby. It remains shabby. But it is run by a team of young music enthusiasts who apparently stage there the kind of mini-concerts that we saw last night. They only have seats for an audience of ten and the several others who walked in during the concert were standees. There were no suits and ties, no cocktail dresses in this audience of middle aged folks who obviously have some connection or other to the store or to the soloist. There was one kid, a girl about aged 10 with her mother. In numbers, this concert was perfectly in line with the early 20th century salons where many of the songs were created and first performed. Of course, those salons were necessarily the property of the well-to-do.

Our soloist has a perfectly pitched voice. Not strong but very precise and agreeable to the ears. She was accompanied by a highly regarded and musically very accomplished pianist who is holder of a Russian Federation award. They presented romances drawn mostly from the repertoire of a celebrated Leningrad stage performer who died many, many years ago but is regarded as a very important popularizer of the genre and inspiration for composers of her age.

The store may have the subtitle Noty (Scores), but neither soloist nor accompanist had any scores. They could go on for hours relying solely on memory. That musical professionalism was always the hallmark of the Mariinsky Theater singers and other Petersburg orchestra members whom we got to know back in the 1990s.

The ”concert” was free of charge. Looking past her through the storefront windows we saw the stream of pedestrians on Nevsky Prospekt who were oblivious to this cultural event. Still further, across the boulevard stands the Kazansky Cathedral, a symbol of this city.

I cannot imagine a concert like this in any other city I know of and it makes Petersburg especially precious.

After the concert we walked our friends a few hundred meters up Nevsky Prospekt through the throngs of pedestrians who, on a pleasant, dry Saturday evening like yesterday come out from the entire city to this boulevard to see and be seen. So it was in the 1840s, so it is today.

We went to one of our favorite haunts in Petersburg for drinks, the ground floor bar of the Grand Hotel Europe (Gostinitsa Evropeiskaya). This was the favorite hotel of Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the place where he took a room immediately upon arrival from abroad. It is located just across from the Philharmonic hall (originally the club of Petersburg nobility) and from the so-called Square of the Arts on which the buildings of the Russian Museum and the Maly Opera Theater (originally the Italian Opera) are situated. The ensemble of these streets dates from the 1820s.

There are many 4 and 5 star hotels in Petersburg today, but there is only one Grand Hotel d’Europe. When we left the hotel to catch the taxi we ordered by phone, former Minister of Culture Mikhail Shvydkoi (2000-2004) arrived by taxi with his wife. Obviously for him as well, this hotel has warm memories.

By Dmitri Kovalevich, Multiplural World, 5/19/24

(Dmitri Kovalevich is the special correspondent in Ukraine for Al Mayadeen English. He writes situation reports from there twice per month. This report appeared originally in Al Mayadeen English on May 18, 2024.)

In early May, the Ukrainian army continued to gradually retreat and lose territory in the former Ukraine oblast of Donetsk in the Donbass region. In some cases, units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have fled the advancing Russian military, as happened during the recent capture of the town of Ocheretino in what is today the Donetsk People’s Republic of the Russian Federation. The town is located some 35 km north of Donetsk city.

Retreating Ukrainian troops are complaining of no prepared defense lines for them to fall back upon when they are forced to withdraw. This is a repeat of events during the losses of the city of Artyomovsk (called ‘Bakhmut’ in Ukraine) in 2023 and Avdeevka in Donetsk in 2024, both situated further north and east of Donetsk city. It turns out that many of the funds allocated for the construction of defense lines for Ukraine have been stolen or otherwise appropriated. But that is only one problem. The main problem is the fact there are too few construction brigades in Ukraine available to actually build any defensive lines.

“The reason why Russians are able to undertake quick and successful offensives such as at Ocheretino is simple; it is because of ongoing plunder of financial resources for the construction of defenses,” writes the Ukrainian telegram channel ‘First News, War’. Referring to the Western-armed-and-financed governing regime in Kiev, it writes, “Zelensky and Co. are doing everything possible to fill their pockets, up to the creation of one-day companies winning state tenders.” The Associated Press wrote in early May, citing Ukrainian military officials, that Ukraine’s allocation of $960 million for the construction of defensive structures is hampered by corruption.

In reality, instead of a complex network of tunnels and fortifications, a few holes have been dug in the ground. All the fortifications shown to Ukrainians on television in videos produced by the government do not exist. There is hardly a single, fully-fledged defensive barrier along Ukraine’s second line of defense in Donbass.

The Russian army is now coming up against the main defensive line of Ukraine, between the towns of Pokrovsk and Kurakhovo, some 40 km west of Donetsk. This line protects the entire eastern front of the AFU, as explained by the ‘PolitNavigator’ Telegram channel (which is based in Crimea). The reason this is happening, according to another report on PolitNavigator, citing Russian military correspondent Marat Khairullin, is because the Russian military-industrial complex has saturated the area with attack drones. “The drones are being delivered every month by the thousands, both from official military sources and from volunteers organized in companies of 12 or 15. This is how the work with these drones is organized now, for each brigade. There used to be a problem with drones, but now there are plenty of them and there are no problems at all,” Khairullin is cited.

Ukraine, on the other hand, has proven unable to produce large numbers of drones, according to Yuriy Butusov, a Ukrainian military expert and editor-in-chief of the anti-Russia Censor online publication. “Neither the financing nor the placing of orders for drones has been organized in time. As a result, we had only a paltry number of drones delivered in the past three months. The state delivered a little more than 20,000 FPV [first-person-view] drones in this time.” Also, according to him, even the arrival of Western military aid will not alter the situation on the battlefield.

The difference in approach between the two warring sides is also due to the fact that the war in Ukraine is very much a war against Russia incited and driven by the NATO countries. Whereas Russia is fighting with its own citizens and voters, the NATO countries are fighting using expendable Ukrainians who, moreover, do not elect the president of the United States nor the chancellor of Germany and therefore cannot call them to account.

It is impossible for Ukraine to conscript yet more men into its army while seeking to step up military production at the same time. Ukrainian MP Roman Kostenko explains on Telegram how Ukraine is conscripting workers and engineers away from military production enterprises. According to him, the phones of conscripts are taken from them and they are left to leave a message with family as they are spirited away for military training.

Russian Colonel Gennady Alekhin writes in Ukraine.ru that the only means of warfare at Kiev’s disposal these days are the work of military conscriptors and the human beings they seek out for forced military service. However, the humans available for military service are quickly running out; as a result, in Alekhin’s opinion, a military-political situation is emerging in which Ukrainians will begin fighting among themselves within their own country for survival. “Today, the survival of each person being conscripted depends on one thing – whether he can jump off the train taking him to join a group of poorly-trained fighters on the front lines. Knowledge of this uncomfortable fact is becoming universal in Ukraine, and this is even more palpable than the fear of Russia’s goals of denazification and demilitarization of the country.”

Without human rights in a land of ‘democracy’

In May, amendments to the Labor Code of Ukraine come into force giving to employers the right to fire those workers who may have relatives or friends in Russia, especially in what the Ukraine regime calls “occupied territories”. These are the territories such as Crimea and Donbass which rejected the legitimacy of the government born of the coup in Kiev in February 2014 and which have voted to join the Russian Federation as constituent republics. Bill 7731, also called the ‘collaboration law’, was submitted back in 2022 by a group of people’s deputies from Zelensky’s ‘Servant of the People’ political/electoral machine. The main initiator of the bill was Galina Tretiakova, who in 2020 complained that too many children of ‘very low quality’ were being born in Ukraine to families in need of financial assistance and were thus increasing Ukraine’s already excessive social welfare burden.

Pravda.co.ua reported on April 29, “In a letter dated April 4, 2024, which was not reported until recently, Ukraine informed Strasbourg [the European Parliament] that in the future, the obligations of the Ukrainian government to comply with Article 8 (respect of private and family life), Article 10 (freedom of speech), and Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association) of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, as well as Article 2 of Protocol 4 of the Convention [right to free movement of people].”

Such changes are a gross violation of basic human rights as they introduce criminal liability based on the fact of blood relationship, not on acts committed. The Ukrainian authorities are now actively seeking channels and tools to influence Russian citizens, including for the commission of terrorist acts. They seek out relatives of Ukrainian citizens for this purpose, and this is why the amendment to the Labor Code was introduced.

At the end of April, it also became known that Ukraine has submitted a written statement to the Council of Europe announcing a partial and self-declared exemption from the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms. The statement said that during martial law, human rights provided for by a number of articles of the Ukrainian constitution may be restricted. This includes the right to free elections, inviolability of the home, secrecy of correspondence and telephone conversations, the right to freedom of speech and freedom of movement, education, entrepreneurial activity, and labor. In practice, all these freedoms have been restricted in Ukraine since the 2014 coup, but they are now being officially abandoned. Nevertheless, the Western media still refers to Ukraine as a ‘democracy’ that is ‘fighting for democracy’ against ‘authoritarian Russia’.

In May in the Odessa region, for example, a lawyer was forcibly removed by police from a client’s home as the police were conducting a search of the home. When the lawyer arrived at the house, the police informed him that he should urgently go to the local military enlistment center, but he declined to do so, asking for proper notification for such a request. Minutes later, 15 armed and masked men arrived in a minibus, rounded up the lawyer, and took him away by force.

Videos of forced abductions of civilians by military conscriptors are spreading across Ukraine every day. In response, the government introduced criminal liability in May for those videotaping the work of military recruiters. The penalties are up to eight years in prison.

In early May, a resident of Odessa received the same prison term of eight years, in that case for posting symbols on a social network of the former Soviet Union and Soviet Ukraine, namely, images of a hammer and sickle and a red star.

Zelensky wanted

In early May, the Russian Federation officially declared Vladimir Zelenskyy to be wanted by the Russian criminal system as of May 20, along with a number of other Ukrainian politicians who came to power during the ‘Maidan coup’ of February 2014. The date May 20 marks the end of Zelensky’s five-year election term as president. But the U.S. and the large countries of Western Europe (all members of NATO) want Zelensky to remain in his post for the time being because their war-financing schemes are tied to him, according to explanations by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

These words are ironically interpreted by Ukrainian political scientist and former ombudsman representative Mykhailo Chaplyga, writing on Telegram. He writes, “Aha, so it seems our presidents are to be chosen by MI6  [Britain’s secret police service], all very ‘sovereign’ decision-making, to be sure.”

Ukrainian political scientist Anton Gura wrote on Telegram on April 29, “The deadline for our president is May 20. Beyond that, he becomes a target for the Russian legal system.” To date, when Zelensky has appeared near the front lines, Russian troops have temporarily stopped firing while drones were only used to film him.

The legitimacy of any political power is determined by its ability to hold onto its power. Today, Zelensky, with the help of Ukraine’s security service (political police), is actively purging the leadership of law enforcement agencies as well as bloggers who dare to question his legitimacy.

In early May, the Security Service of Ukraine announced that it had uncovered a plot to eliminate Zelensky, which allegedly involved two colonels of the State Protection Directorate of Ukraine, the service that guards the president. But Zelensky routinely speaks to Western media of various schemes to assassinate him, and what’s more, he uses different numbers. In November 2023, he said there had been five or six assassination attempts against him since the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. By January 2023, his claim had risen to 12 assassination attempts against him organized by Russian troops.

The claims of assassination attempts are no doubt an effort to arouse the sympathy of Western audiences for Zelensky, portraying him as a victim of Russian aggression and seeking to draw attention away from the large, global events unfavorable to Western interests that are occurring in the Middle East, Africa, or elsewhere.

The fact that the Russian Federation will not recognize Zelensky’s legitimacy after May 20 means that the Russian Federation will have no one with whom to sign a peace treaty. This was noted in April by the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. “Today, we could sign an agreement with him [Zelensky], some kind of agreement, let’s say. But then someone else would replace him in power and decide he or she doesn’t like the agreement. They know how to do this in Ukraine–just look at the Minsk agreements [of September 2014 and February 2015]. A new president will say that whatever agreement was signed, it was signed by an illegitimate president and is therefore not recognized.”

If Ukraine does not recognize the legitimacy of an agreement signed by its head of state, then any agreement signed by that person with the Russian Federation can be subsequently challenged. Thus, any rejection by Ukraine of a constitutional limit of Zelensky’s term would become another step to perpetuate NATO’s proxy war against the Russian Federation and its allies.

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Related reading:

Ukraine’s divisive mobilization law comes into force as a new Russian push strains front-line troops, report by Associated Press, May 19, 2024

By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 4/24/24

For a long time, the Kremlin has done a diplomatic dance in the Middle East to maintain equally good relations with all the major players. And for more than a decade, it had succeeded beyond expectations, keeping workable, if not warm, terms with Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran simultaneously.

But that was before Israel and Iran threatened open hostilities against each other. Now, amid tensions in the Middle East – somewhat eased since an Israeli strike in Iran over the weekend – Moscow’s long-standing outreach to Tel Aviv may become a casualty.

Despite strong personal ties between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has fallen back on its traditional friends in the West for support amid the deepening crisis. Meanwhile, Russia has moved into an even tighter embrace with Iran, which it relies on for weapons to fight the war in Ukraine, growing trade and economic cooperation, and vital assistance in evading Western sanctions – apparently including a fleet of “ghost tankers” to move Russian oil to world markets.

And if the situation between Iran and Israel does spiral, it could become a major problem for Russia.

“Relations with Israel have deteriorated, though both sides retain contact,” says Vladimir Sotnikov, an expert with the IMEMO Center for International Security in Moscow. Ideally, he says, “Russia wants to maintain ties with Israel, while strengthening its strategic partnership with Tehran. A war between Israel and Iran would not be beneficial to Moscow. But Russia’s ability to influence events is quite limited. … If it were to be drawn into such a conflict, it would divert significant resources from its operations in Ukraine.”

The big exception

After Israel attacked Iran’s embassy in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, killing several top Iranian officials, Moscow issued a stern condemnation. Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, called it a “flagrant violation” of international law and alleged that “such aggressive actions by Israel are designed to further fuel the conflict. They are absolutely unacceptable and must stop.”

But following a retaliatory Iranian attack, involving 300 missiles and drones fired at Israel, Moscow only called upon the two sides to exercise greater restraint. In a subsequent telephone conversation with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Mr. Putin emphasized improving relations between the two countries, and both leaders agreed on the need to avoid a new round of confrontations.

“Russia still wants to keep a balance, and has no interest in seeing a big conflict in the Middle East, but Israel has become the big exception” to traditional efforts to stay on good terms with everyone, says Dmitry Suslov, an international affairs expert at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

He says that Israel disappointed Moscow by condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even though it declined to supply lethal weapons to Kyiv. But basic channels of communication, and even cooperation in Syria, remained until the present. “Russia still does not shoot down Israeli planes and missiles over Syrian territory, although it could,” says Mr. Suslov.

Meanwhile, Russia has supplied some advanced weaponry to Iran, including S-300 air defense systems. Unconfirmed reports suggest that it’s ready to greatly upgrade Iran’s military capabilities with advanced Su-35 fighter planes, S-400 anti-aircraft systems, submarines, and more. Russia has not yet begun major deliveries of modern weapons to Iran, which experts variously ascribed to the demands of the Ukraine war on Russian military industry and Iran’s failure to make payment.

Trade between Russia and Iran has expanded rapidly in the past few years, in a wide range of goods beyond energy cooperation and weaponry. One big item is Russia’s investment of almost $700 million in an Iranian railway that will complete the last section of the North-South Corridor, a long-discussed and much-delayed transport route that would connect Iranian ports on the Indian Ocean with Russia’s vast railway network. The completed line would help defeat efforts to sanction Russia and could potentially rival the Suez Canal as a trade route.

“The company Russia wants to be part of”

That said, some Russian analysts don’t deny that the outbreak of conflict in the Middle East has benefited Russian diplomacy and relieved international pressure on Moscow over its war in Ukraine.

“While Russia is not in favor of an Israeli-Iran war, it probably is interested in the continuation of managed tensions,” says Mr. Suslov. “It distracts from Ukraine and forces the U.S. to divert resources to Israel.”

It also dovetails with Russia’s growing investment in alternative international forums that represent mainly countries of the Global South, such as the BRICS group (originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), where condemnation of Israel’s war in Gaza is nearly universal and Western attempts to drum up support for Ukraine have largely gone unheeded.

“It’s vital that Iran has joined BRICS along with several other countries of the global majority,” says Mr. Suslov. “This is the company Russia wants to be part of. It’s existential for us, and for the future world order we hope is being formed.”

A wider geopolitical realignment has been underway for some time, in which Russia, in concert with China, is seeking to build alternative economic and political alliances to replace the existing Western-led ones.

It helps to have common enemies, says Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser. “Russia and Iran had lots of differences in the past,” he says, “but in the situation where they both find themselves in opposition to the U.S. and its world order, they are drawn together out of common interest.”

By Moss Robeson, The Grayzone, 4/25/24

Marko Suprun, an influential NATO state-funded Ukrainian ‘fact-checker’ with close ties to Nazi activists, was taken into police custody in Washington, DC, after assaulting a contributor to The Grayzone at an event hosted by a neocon Beltway think tank. 

The Ukrainian-Canadian host of a self-styled ‘anti-disinformation’ outfit — which receives thousands of dollars from the US and UK governments and works with Facebook to censor content — was arrested on Capitol Hill last week after assaulting a contributor to The Grayzone.

On April 16, Marko Suprun, who presents an English-language show for the group StopFake.org, and whose wife has served as Ukraine’s acting Minister of Health, was charged with simple assault after strangling, shoving, and stomping on Grayzone contributor Moss Robeson. The incident occurred during an anti-Russia event hosted by the neoconservative Jamestown Foundation, entitled “Russia’s Rupture and Western Policy.” Robeson was fully credentialed and authorized by organizers to participate in the discussion.

“This is the guy! This is the guy!” Suprun reportedly shouted, while forcing Robeson into the hallway, choking him with both hands, and pushing him to the ground, leaving his glasses broken.

Footage of the event streamed online shows that immediately after the assault, one of the organizers took to the stage to denounce the US-born Robeson as a “Russian troll” and claimed that The Grayzone’s contributor deliberately incited the physical attack against him, before admonishing attendees to behave themselves:

“Today we had a troll called Moss Robeson who provoked one of our participants and managed to get him in trouble. So I’m warning everyone, be careful. Don’t get into any arguments with anyone. Just walk away.”

Mr. Stopfake and ‘Dr. Death’ honor Bandera and court Nazis

Suprun’s organization, StopFake, publicly presents itself as a humble Kiev-based “nongovernmental organization” focused on fact-checking. Its stated goals include implementing “high standards of journalism education in Ukraine, raising the “level of media literacy,” and informing the public about “the danger of propaganda and dissemination of fake information in the media.” The group insists that it receives no government funds, stating flatly on its “About Us” page: “Stopfake.org is not supported financially or otherwise by any official Ukrainian organization or government agency.”

But the group’s claim of editorial independence is immediately contradicted by its own website, which admits just four sentences later that StopFake is “also supported by… the Foreign Ministry of the Czech Republic, [and] the Embassy of [the] United Kingdom.”

In fact, StopFake has received extensive funding from not only the British government but also the US-based National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cutout that’s largely funded by Congress and the State Department.

StopFake was founded in 2014, but as a 2017 Politico report explained, “it was only after [the 2016] presidential election in the U.S. — when Russian fake news and cyberattacks were blamed for swaying the election in Donald Trump’s favor — that the site burst onto the global stage.”

“Almost overnight, the founders of StopFake went from provincial do-gooders to international media stars,” Politico marveled, while praising the group as “the ‘grand wizards’ of the fake-news-busting world.”

With lavish funding from Western governments and regular citations in legacy media outlets, Suprun has exploited his position in the “fake-news-busting world” to whitewash notorious Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a heroic resistance fighter who simply “refused to cooperate” with the Germans. His fascist-friendly tendencies do not stop there.

Not long after the Politico article was published, Suprun appeared at a nationalist summer camp in Ukraine alongside a pair of prominent neo-Nazi band leaders, Andriy Sereda and Arseniy Bilodub, who affectionately referred to Suprun as one of their ‘blood brothers’ — a term of endearment reportedly bestowed only on those who’ve completed a pagan-style ceremony which involves bloodletting. In addition to serving as the frontman for white supremacist band Perun’s Ax, Bilodub is also a leader of the infamous Right Sector movement and has been described as “the spiritual leader of the Ukrainian far right.”

Among the attendees of the Jamestown Foundation event, Suprun was hardly alone in maintaining such relationships. Other speakers from Ukraine included the odious Russian “opposition leader” Ilya Ponomarev, a political figurehead of the Nazi-infested Russian units in the International Legion, which reports to Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov. Ponomarev is also the spokesman of the dubious “National Republican Army” in Russia, on whose behalf he previously attempted to claim responsibility for Ukraine’s assassinations inside Russia.

After StopFake partnered with Facebook in 2020 to create a fact-checking service for the popular social media platform in Ukraine, it seemed that such associations might come back to haunt Suprun and his employer. In an effort to address the controversy, Suprun published a lengthy defense of his behavior which culminated with a bizarre admission:

“Have I had people with swastika tattoos in my office? I don’t examine people’s bodies as a rule, but yes. Does that make me a neo-Nazi? No,” he insisted. 

Marko Suprun’s far-right connections in Ukraine are, in fact, extensive and well-documented, but they appear to pale in comparison to those of his wife, Ulana Suprun. Long before her 2016 appointment as Ukraine’s acting Minister of Health, where her lethal push for privatization earned her the nickname “Dr. Death,” Suprun has maintained close relations with a number of violent neo-Nazi organizations, including C14, which has been credited with carrying out a wave of brutal anti-Roma pogroms.

According to Ukrainian journalist Olekisy Kuzmenko, “Suprun’s contacts with C14 go back years.” What could have been a major scandal for Facebook got swept under the rug, and StopFake, which remains one of its fact-checking partners, only doubled down on its defense of C14.

Ulana Suprun has been described as one of the main patrons of the far-right activist Serhii Sternenko, 29, who led the Right Sector’s massacre of “anti-Maidan” protesters in Odessa in May 2014 and ultimately helped to ignite the civil war in eastern Ukraine. In March 2020, after StopFake officially partnered with Facebook, Suprun declared the “Russian world” to be “a threat that’s scarier than coronavirus,” and went on to hail Sternenko, who once stabbed a man to death, as “an example of that [new] generation of Ukrainians who can put everything in its place.” In the coming months, Suprun hired Sternenko’s girlfriend as her press secretary.

Suprun helps lead secret fascist network behind cover of Ukrainian American community

At the Jamestown Foundation’s April 16 event in Washington DC, Moss Robeson attempted to question Suprun approximately an hour before the assault. “Can I interest you in some OUN documents?” The Grayzone contributor asked Marko Suprun, who stonewalled. 

As an independent researcher, Robeson has spent years studying the present-day activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the infamous group of Nazi collaborators who oversaw the elimination of over 100,000 Poles and Jews in German-occupied Ukraine.

Evidence has emerged that the Supruns are sworn members of the contemporary OUN-B, the more radical ‘Banderite’ faction of the OUN which was personally founded by the genocidal fascist Stepan Bandera.

For decades, legacy media outlets have ignored the OUN-B’s continued existence in Ukraine and the diaspora, assuming the group to be irrelevant and defunct. That was certainly the impression relayed by the Jamestown Foundation forum’s alleged expert on “Russia’s rupture,” Janusz Bugajski, who visited the OUN-B headquarters in Ukraine in early 2024, but who privately insisted that the OUN-B no longer exists.

However, firsthand testimony and deep documentation reviewed by The Grayzone indicates that the group has been secretly maintained by its founders’ descendants, and continues to operate in the shadows behind a web of seemingly legitimate Ukrainian lobbying and communal organizations. The Supruns operate at the heart of this secret fascist network.

According to Ulana herself, she met her future husband, Marko Suprun, at a Banderite ideological camp in Ellenville, New York that consisted of “political workshops” with OUN-B leaders. The event was organized by the Ukrainian Student Organization of Mikhnovsky (TUSM), a Cold War-era international youth group affiliated with OUN-B and named for a pioneering ultranationalist who famously dreamed of an ethnically pure Greater Ukraine “from the Carpathians to the Caucasus.” Many contemporary leaders of the surviving OUN-B network in the Ukrainian diaspora cut their teeth in this organization, which kept the flame of Banderite fascism burning long after it was extinguished in Ukraine under Soviet authorities. 

In 1984, the TUSM elected as its vice president 21-year-old Ulana Jurkiw, just one year after she led a sit-in at the Dachau concentration camp museum to protest its supposed anti-Ukrainian bias. In 1981, Jurkiw participated in a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Banderites’ “restoration of Ukrainian statehood” in Nazi-occupied western Ukraine alongside the former Prime Minister of its short-lived Nazi client state, OUN-B leader Yaroslav Stetsko — who famously endorsed “the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine.”

After Bandera’s former deputy Yaroslav Stetsko died in 1986, the local OUN-B leader in Jurkiw’s hometown of Detroit became the chairman of Stetsko’s government in exile, which only existed on paper.

Five years later, Ulana Jurkiw married Marko Suprun. They moved to New York City, where they became active in a pair of OUN-B “facade structures” established at the dawn of the Cold War — the Ukrainian Youth Association (CYM) and Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine (ODFFU). By the mid-2000s, Marko Suprun joined the board of directors of ODFFU, Inc., which owns the “Home of the Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front” in Manhattan — the OUN-B’s headquarters in the US.

In December 2013, when anti-Russian ‘Euromaidan’ protests began to gather steam, the Supruns relocated to Kiev, apparently viewing the deadly political crisis as a major opportunity. By February 2014, Marko Suprun was hard at work assisting far-right leader Oleh Tyahnybok as a translator. Just over a year earlier, the New York Times observed that Tyahnybok infamously “used slurs to refer to the ‘Jewish-Russian mafia, which rules in Ukraine,’” and reported that “some of his [Svoboda] party’s members are unabashed neo-Nazis.”

The Supruns were largely catapulted into the spotlight by their “Patriot Defense” initiative, which sent first aid kits to volunteer battalions in Ukraine, including extremist groups like Right Sector and Azov. “Patriot Defense” originated in the Manhattan branch of ODFFU, and rented an office in the Ukrainian headquarters of OUN-B. In the meantime, the Banderite-led Ukrainian World Congress adopted Patriot Defense and hired Ulana Suprun as its Director of Humanitarian Initiatives. 

In 2016, the Supruns’ status as a diaspora-bred Ukrainian power couple was cemented when Ulana became the acting Healthcare Minister of Ukraine, and Marko joined StopFake. Already millionaires, they lived in a Kiev apartment that belonged to a treasurer of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation (UAFF) — another “facade structure” which owns 40% of the Banderite headquarters in Ukraine’s capital, according to an OUN-B financial report. Their landlord’s first husband, Oleh Vitovych (1967-2011), was an early leader of yet another far-right organization in Ukraine.

In 2019, when UAFF leaders engineered a coup d’etat in ODFFU for the OUN-B to retain full control of its building in Manhattan, an anonymous whistleblower submitted a sensational complaint to the New York State Attorney General’s office, entitled “UAFF Inc  -  Large Scare Fraudulent Financial Activities  -  Fascist Organization  -  Underground Paramilitary Training Activities  -  Grand Scale Fraud.” The report described Marko Suprun as “a very active [OUN-B] member.”

The small entourage of the OUN-B’s Ukrainian-American leaders participating in the Jamestown Foundation’s April 2024 forum included UAFF president Walter Zaryckyj, an influential OUN-B figure affiliated with the TUSM, who arrived at the event alongside the Supruns. During a previous visit to the OUN-B’s Manhattan headquarters, Zaryckyj warned Robeson about the looming presence of “someone out in Washington who’s gonna blow you [up] and [The Grayzone editor] Max Blumenthal and that whole fucking circle of dipshits working with the Russians.”

Marko Suprun and his aforementioned landlord have served on the board of Zaryckyj’s Center for US-Ukrainian Relations. The Center is yet another important OUN-B front, which was established in 2000 by the “informational arm” of the UAFF — in other words, the US branch of the OUN-B’s Ukrainian Central Information Service, which shared its international headquarters with a private Stepan Bandera museum in London.

But the Supruns’ extensive links to Ukrainian fascist movements don’t end there. 

In 2012-13, the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations established a Washington bureau in the headquarters of the neoconservative American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), with financial support from Ulana Suprun’s father, George Jurkiw. An official Ukrainian Catholic University Foundation profile describes Jurkiw as “a defense contractor that helped produce valuable technology and fire suppression equipment for the A-1 Abrams tank.”

ODFFU president Mykola Hryckowian, another veteran of the now-defunct TUSM youth camps, currently heads up the Banderite bureau in the AFPC. Robeson reports that, prior to the assault by Suprun, Hryckowian subjected him to profanity-laced tirades before complaining to forum organizers about alleged “harassment” by Robeson.

American Banderite leader Walter Zaryckyj openly refers to Herman Pirchner, the president of the AFPC, as “one of [his] best friends.” The Grayzone exposed Pirchner in 2020 as an inner-circle member of the “Christian Right’s secretive and powerful Council for National Policy.”

In 2018, after Max Blumenthal questioned the AFPC’s judgment for hosting a meeting with far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy in the Senate, Pirchner responded with a bizarre non-sequitur in defense of the long-dead Nazi collaborator  Bandera, whose OUN-B organization actually helped arrange Parubiy’s trip to Washington.

When another gadfly, Moss Robeson, challenged OUN-B activist Marko Suprun six years later in Washington, Suprun decided to take matters into his own hands, strangling the “Bandera Lobby Blogger” and winding himself up in a DC jail. 

But as with his apparent affection for Nazis, this rare moment of accountability was unlikely to interfere with Suprun’s lavish Western funding. As the Ukraine proxy war slogs ahead, propagandists like him remain too useful for Washington to discard.

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News, 5/17/24

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s extremely warm reception of President Vladimir Putin yesterday in Beijing sealed the increasingly formidable Russia-China strategic relationship. It amounts to a tectonic shift in the world balance of power. 

The Russia-China entente also sounds the death knell for attempts by U.S. foreign policy neophytes to drive a wedge between the two countries. The triangular relationship has become two-against-one, with serious implications, particularly for the war in Ukraine. If U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy geniuses remain in denial, escalation is almost certain.

In a pre-visit interview with Xinhua, Putin noted the “unprecedented level of strategic partnership between our countries.” He and Xi have met more than 40 times in person or virtually. In June 2018, Xi described Putin as “an old friend of the Chinese people” and, personally, his “best friend.”

For his part, Putin noted Thursday that he and Xi are “in constant contact to keep personal control over all pressing issues on the Russian-Chinese and international agenda.” Putin brought along Defense Minister Andrey Belousov as well as veterans like Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and key business leaders.

Joint Statements Matter

Putin and Xi in Beijing on Feb. 4, 2022. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Xi and Putin signed a strong joint statement Thursday, similar to the extraordinary one the two issued on Feb. 4, 2022, in Beijing. It portrayed their relationship as “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation …”

The full import of that statement did not hit home until Putin launched the Special Military Operation into the Donbass three weeks later. China’s muted reaction shocked most analysts, who had dismissed the possibility that Xi would give “best friend” Putin, in effect, a waiver on China’s bedrock policy of non-interference abroad.

In the following weeks, official Chinese statements made clear that the principles of Westphalia had taken a back seat to “the need for every country to defend its core interests” and to judge each situation “on its own merits.”

Nuclear War

Thursday’s statement expressed concern over “increased strategic risks between nuclear powers” — referring to continued escalation of the war between NATO-supported Ukraine and Russia. It condemns “the expansion of military alliances and creation of military bridgeheads close to the borders of other nuclear powers, particularly with the advanced deployment of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery, as well as other items.”

Putin has undoubtedly briefed Xi on the U.S. missile sites already in Romania and Poland that can launch what Russians call “offensive strike missiles” with flight time to Moscow of less than 10 minutes. Putin surely has told Xi about the inconsistencies in U.S. statements regarding intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

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For example, Xi is aware — just as surely as consumers of Western media are unaware — that during a Dec. 30, 2021, telephone conversation, Biden assured Putin that “Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.”

There was rejoicing in the Kremlin that New Years’ Eve, since Biden’s assurance was the first sign that Washington might acknowledge Russia’s security concerns. Indeed, Biden addressed a key issue in at least five of the eight articles of the Russian draft treaty given to the U.S. on Dec. 17, 2021. Russian rejoicing, however, was short-lived.

Foreign Minister Lavrov revealed last month that when he met Antony Blinken in Geneva in January 2022, the U.S. secretary of state pretended he’d not heard of Biden’s undertaking to Putin on Dec. 30, 2021. Rather, Blinken insisted that U.S. medium-range missiles could be deployed in Ukraine, and only that the U.S. might be willing to limit their number, Lavrov said.

The Mother of All Miscalculations

Biden and Putin meeting at the at the Villa La Grange in Geneva, June 16, 2021, flanked by Blinken on left, Lavrov on right. (White House/ Adam Schultz)

When Biden took office in 2021, his advisers assured him that he could play on Russia’s fear (sic) of China and drive a wedge between them. This became embarrassingly clear when Biden indicated what he had told Putin during their Geneva summit on June 16, 2021.

That meeting gave Putin confirmation that Biden and his advisers were stuck in a woefully outdated appraisal of Russia-China relations.

Here is the bizarre way Biden described his approach to Putin on China:

“Without quoting him [Putin] — which I don’t think is appropriate — let me ask a rhetorical question: You got a multi-thousand-mile border with China. China is seeking to be the most powerful economy in the world and the largest and the most powerful military in the world.”

The ‘Squeeze’

Putin in video conference with Xi on Dec. 15, 2021. (Kremlin)

At the airport after the summit, Biden’s aides did their best to whisk him onto the plane, but failed to stop him from sharing more wisdom on China:

“Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China.”

After these remarks Putin and Xi spent the rest of 2021 trying to disabuse Biden of the “China squeeze” on Russia: it was not a squeeze, but a fraternal embrace. This mutual effort culminated in a Xi-Putin virtual summit on Dec. 15 of that year. 

The video of the first minute of their conversation was picked up by The New York Times, as well as others. Still, most commentators seemed to miss its significance:

Putin:

“Dear friend, dear President Xi Jinping.

Next February I expect we can finally meet in person in Beijing as we agreed. We will hold talks and then participate in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games. I am grateful for your invitation to attend this landmark event.”

Xi:

“Dear President Putin, my old friend. It’s my pleasure to meet you at the end of this year by video, the second time this year, our 37th meeting since 2013. You have hailed … China-Russia relations as a model in international collaboration in the 21st Century, strongly supporting China’s position on safeguarding its core interests, and firmly opposed to attempts to drive a wedge between our two countries. I highly appreciate it.”

Is Biden still unaware of this? Have his advisers told him that Russia and China have never been closer, with what amounts to a virtual military alliance?

The Election

Putin has said he is aware that Washington’s policy toward Russia “is primarily impacted by domestic political processes.” Russia and China certainly assess that Biden’s policy on Ukraine will be influenced by the political imperative to be seen as facing Russia down.

If NATO country hotheads send “trainers” to Ukraine, the prospect of a military dust-up is ever present. What Biden needs to know is that, if it comes to open hostilities between Russia and the West, he is likely to face more than just saber rattling in the South China Sea — and the specter of a two-front war.

The Chinese know they are next in line for the ministrations of NATO/East. Indeed, it is no secret that the Pentagon sees China as enemy No. 1. According to the DOD’s National Defense Strategy, “defense priorities are first, defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the People’s Republic of China.”

The Pentagon will be the last to sing a requiem for the dearly departed unipolar world. May sanity prevail.

Ray McGovern’s first portfolio as a C.I.A. analyst was Sino-Soviet relations. In 1963, their total trade was $220 MILLION; in 2023, $227 BILLION. Do the math.

Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.